Holey Optochip! IBM hits a terabit of info per second

CNET ^ | March 7, 2012 9:01 PM PST | Daniel Terdiman

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Big Blue's new prototype chip surpasses major milestone, thanks to unlikely innovation: tiny holes in a quarter-inch chip, boosting data transfer.

A look at the IBM Holey Optochip, a new chip architecture capable of transferring a terabit of information per second.(Credit: IBM)

IBM said this evening that its scientists have developed a computer chip that can move a trillion bits of information a second.

Known as the "Holey Optochip," the prototype optical chipset can transfer the equivalent of 500 high-definition movies a second, or the entire U.S. Library of Congress Web archive in an hour, Big Blue said. The innovation is possible because IBM's scientists figured out that, by drilling 48 minuscule holes in a standard quarter-inch silicon CMOS chip, they were able to ramp up data transfer rates from what was possible.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thats moving stuff.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Article has an inconsistent statement....

And by breaking through the terabyte-per-second barrier,

Which doesn't match the earlier statements....don't know which is correct.

[Chode]

and it prolly puts out a teraBTU's tooo...

[rawcatslyentist]

Doubtful we’ll get NASA back after that black hole ate it!

[OneWingedShark]

Probably the terabit one; it’s an eighth that of a terabyte.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

That is still fast....

[Nachoman]

Just imagine what the speed of fail will be now.

[Danae]

Wow.

Right on!

[Revolting cat!]

HD 3D porno videos will make it look like you’re there in the action!

[Dallas59]

That’s nice...but we don’t have the bandwidth to to match. According to AT&T we consumers are ruining the net with HD demand. So they have to charge more or limit our data. It’s for the childrens.

[Slump Tester]

But does it beep like my old Atari? Now THAT would be cool!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

ATT needs to update their transistors

[Marine_Uncle]

RE: "Thats moving stuff."
Rather quickly at that.

[achilles2000]

gig speeds are coming to homes in Houston - all the bandwidth you can eat.

[dfwgator]

That’s a lot of pr0n.

[SunkenCiv]

Holey Optochip, Batman.

[ADemocratNoMore]

That's all well and good, far be it for me to belittle such a feat, but what happens when you want to store that data? It typically takes hours to store a Terabyte to a hard disk and while SSDs will reduce write times somewhat, it will still take a number of hours to write all those bits somewhere, somehow. Assume a major bottleneck in write speeds, you also are faced with the problem with caching another TB every 8 seconds. Ping me in a few years (or decades) when they've got that figured out. BTW, I know, “Keep it in the Cloud,” but the data still has to find it's way onto a server, if only at the front end of the stream, else we will be strictly limited to live streams that have to be down-resed to be stored at all.